If concerns over the NHS reforms are worth hiding, then they need revealing.

The real objection to making public the Civil Service’s advice to ministers, according to the economist Sir Samuel Brittan, is that “it might reveal how banal and obvious the advice has been”. Ouch! If that wasn’t enough to make secretive ministers and mandarins wince, Sir Samuel was even more forthright. “We need to dump the doctrine of the confidentiality of advice given to ministers by officials,” he said, and quoted Rudyard Kipling: “Power without responsibility has been the privilege of the harlot throughout the ages: and self-serving talk of 'telling truth to power’ should not disguise this.”

Kipling’s dictum, borrowed by his cousin Stanley Baldwin, was meant as a jibe against an over-powerful media. It is not often you see top civil servants likened to a bunch of tarts. Yet Sir Samuel has seen Whitehall up close. He was speaking at the launch of his latest book, Inside the Department of Economic Affairs. It is a diary that he kept – quite in breach of Civil Service rules – when he was an official in the Sixties. Ending the secrecy of civil service advice has been a theme of his writing ever since. Sadly, the forces of reaction are still doing all they can to resist openness.

This week, despite a tribunal ruling, the Government vetoed publication under the Freedom of Information Act of the transitional risk register. This covers civil servants’ assessment of the risks posed by implementation of the Government’s health reforms. The veto has been used three times before to prevent disclosure of Cabinet minutes. Here it was used at the behest of Health Secretary Andrew Lansley, though the rest of the Cabinet had to approve – which means those supposed proponents of transparency, the Lib Dems, were in the conspiracy of secrecy up to their necks.

Make no mistake – this was a conspiracy, not a cock-up. The risks in these registers are graded on a traffic-light basis. A leaked copy of an early version of the register correctly showed a red light over possible unexpected changes to the Bill – and in the event, there were a plethora of alterations. It also showed red when it came to the risk of the Government losing control of the reforms’ financing. Mr Lansley clearly feared that publication of the final register would lead to headlines on the theme of: “Even government officials expect health reforms to fail.”

With all now comparatively quiet on the health front – for the moment – ministers evidently decided that bad publicity from vetoing publication of the register was a much smaller risk than a possible storm of protest that might be caused by re-opening the whole debate.

Ministers have published a document this week explaining what action they have taken to mitigate possible risks – but without knowing what the risks are, it is impossible for the public to judge. By doing so, the Government has made itself look foolish as well as hypocritical.

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One leading proponent of keeping Whitehall policy discussions secret is Sir Gus (now Lord) O’Donnell, the former Cabinet Secretary. He has been at it again recently, warning that risk-averse ministers need a “safe space” and that if they don’t have it, they will do everything informally, over the phone.

Speaking at the London School of Economics, Lord O’Donnell insisted that a minister must be able to tell a colleague his ideas were “crazy for the following four reasons” without their debate appearing in the next day’s headlines. Although why the rest of us should be excluded from that discussion until the papers are released, decades later, is not clear.

Mind you, Lord O’Donnell is gaining personal experience of unkind headlines. He is thinking of applying to be the next Governor of the Bank of England, which might be why he has been taking such a high profile – not always successfully. In a recent interview, he was so non-committal that his comments were described as “a great wet sob of nothingness” (under the headline “Half man, half stapler”). Not the best way to launch his candidacy for the bank job.

Still, the decision about who gets the governorship won’t be based on popularity: it will be up to Chancellor George Osborne. “George will either want Gus or he won’t – and there’ll be nothing Gus can do about it,” says one insider.

Lord O’Donnell has also been masterminding the campaign of his former Cabinet Office colleague Siobhan Benita to be Mayor of London. Standing as an independent, she came fifth with 3.8 per cent of the vote – not a bad showing from a standing start. The only fly in the ointment from His Lordship’s point of view, as he seeks to persuade Mr Osborne of his talents, is that she emerged as a Left-of-centre candidate – and there have even been suggestions that next time she might stand for Labour.

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I am told that civil servants are busy dusting down their briefings for incoming ministers and trying to arrange lunch/coffee/a quick word with Lord O’Donnell’s successor, Sir Jeremy Heywood. Many now think there will be no Cabinet reshuffle until September, but the mandarins want to be ready. The point of a word with Sir Jeremy is to find out if their minister is likely to be moved and to put in a plea for whom they would like to have instead.

There are reports that some mandarins – the name of Sir Suma Chakrabarti, the top official at the Ministry of Justice, is mentioned – even claim to have chosen their ministers in the past. Certainly, the Civil Service has an input: in the coming weeks, the politicians should watch their step with the Sir Humphreys.